The battle for market share in the ‘big data’ arena gets ever fiercer, with Google now entering the fray following recent announcements by IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.

The battle for market share in the ‘big data’ arena gets ever fiercer, with Google now entering the fray following recent announcements by IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

According to a blog post by Ju-kay Kwek on the Google Code Blog, Google is releasing big improvements to its BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics, as well as making the system available, by invitation, to companies of all sizes. The BigQuery Service was announced at Google I/O last year in a preview edition open to a limited number of enterprises and developers.

The new release has a graphical user interface, so it’s easier to explore massive data sets through a web application. More usefully for developers, there’s a new REST-based API that you can use to run multiple jobs in the background, as well as giving you tighter control over tables and permissions. You can now also write queries with JOIN statements to retrieve data from multiple tables, and the results of any queries can be exported either to a desktop app or to Google Cloud Storage for more ‘normal’ data analysis.

You can try out BigQuery free of charge at the moment, and Google has promised to let customers know at least 30 days before the free period ends. BigData is still in beta, and you’ll need to sign up here, and then be invited to join, to try it out.

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